Maurice Ravel
Maurice Ravel was born in Ciboure, March 7, 1875. His father's background was Swiss and his mother's was Basque, but he was brought up in Paris. Here he studied at the Conservatoire from approximately 1889 to 1895, returning in 1897 to study further with Faure and Gedalge. Ravel never married, but he did have several long-running relationships. He was also known to frequent the bordellos of Paris. During his schooling in Paris, Ravel joined with a number of innovative young composers who referred to themselves as the "Apaches" because of their wild abandon. The group was well known for its drunken revelry. In 1893, he met Chabrier and Satie, both who were influential to his future career as a musician. Ravel was also highly influenced from music around the world including American Jazz, Asian music, and traditional folk songs from across Europe. Ravel was not religious and was probably an atheist. He disliked the openly religious themes of other composers, such as Wagner, and instead preferred to look to classical mythology for inspiration. A decade later he was a well-known composer, at least of songs and piano pieces, working with great care he could imitate a composer such as Lisztian bravura, or a style li
Quite apart from that, he averred that Liabeuf had been the victim of a trumped-up charge simply because he was an anarchist. In 1932, Ravel was involved in an automobile accident that severely reduced his health. net/) after Liabeuf's execution, Ravel was so upset that for a few days he shut himself up in his home, refusing to see anybody. During the next decade, when he was in his thirties, he was producing most of his works. Other postwar works return to some of his obsessions, like with the pleasure and risk of the child's world in a sophisticated fantasy opera called L'enfant et les sortileges, which used Spanish sounding music for a projected Don Quixote film. "From childhood he had a particular liking for minute objects, miniatures, the tiny world of figurines, little things that worked by clockwork, mechanical birds 'whose heart-beats he felt' and miniscule Japanese gardens which evoked for him the giants of the forest" The composer wrote many great pieces like Sheherazade, which was his second piece, or a Spanish styled composition Rapsodie espagnole. The set of three Mallarme songs with nonet (a musical combinations of nine instruments) accompaniment were written partly under the influence of Stravinsky's Japanese Lyrics and Schonberg's Pierrot lunaire. Ravel entered the contest on five different accounts, but he never won. He was, he told me, against the death penalty always. When the criminal Liabeuf was condemned to death for shooting two policemen: "Ravel was among the most eager to secure a reprieve. Outside of his musical life, he also had a care for other people and their well-being and social events (or at least a personal view on what he believed was right and what was not). Another, more popular, event he took part in was the Prix de Rome.
Common topics in this essay:
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Don Quixote,
Rome Prix,
War Ravel,
Schonberg's Pierrot,
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Rite Spring,
Paris Ravel,
Chabrier Satie,
Gedalge Ravel,
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Acceptance Essays
